Category: Uncategorized

The small-ship navy

In USA TODAY. Now, I wonder where Instapundit might have come across this bit of discussion on reshaping the military?

When it comes to the Navy, we can have a big fleet of small ships, or
a small fleet of big ships.  For quite a while now, we’ve gone with the
big ships, but some people are arguing that that’s a mistake.

One of those is Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, U.S. Navy, who recently wrote in the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute that
“In an age of precision-strike weapon proliferation, a big-ship navy
equals a brittle fleet. What’s needed is a revamped force structure
based on smaller surface combatants.”

He makes some excellent points. Currently, the U.S. Navy dominates the seas. A U.S. Navy Carrier Battle Group can project power
in a way no other nation’s navy can approach, essentially placing a
large airbase within striking range of pretty much any place on the
planet worth striking. Of course, the problem with this is that
aircraft carriers aren’t just powerful. They’re also big, expensive and
vulnerable. (The non-carrier part of a Carrier Battle Group is basically there to protect the carrier from submarines and missiles).

However, the fact is that regardless of how the USN reconfigures, it can’t expect to dominate the coastlines like it did in the heyday of the aircraft carrier. Great Britain managed the transition from the age of the ship-of-the-line to the age of the battleship without losing its dominance of the high seas, but there is no guarantee that the USA will be able to do so.

In fact, in light of the demographic changes and consequential decline in national capabilities, I expect that China will surpass the USA as the leading naval power before the 22nd century.

“We have lost the city”

It’s hard to feel too sorry for the lutefisk-eating surrender monkeys of Norway:

Grønland is only two subway stops from the Parliament, and one from the Central Station, fairly close to the government offices that were bombed by Breivik.

It looks like Karachi, Basra, and Mogadishu all rolled into one. People sell drugs openly just next to the Grønland subway station.

It’s not Norway or Europe anymore, except when there is welfare money to be collected. The police have largely given up. Early in 2010 Aftenposten stated that there are sharia patrols in this area, and gay couples are assaulted and chased away. “Immigrant Fatima Tetouani says that ‘Grønland is more Muslim than Morocco.’”

Readers should remember that Aftenposten, which is the largest newspaper in the Oslo region, is normally pro-Islamic and very Multicultural.

Sturla Nøstvik (36) did not suspect any danger when the barrel of a pistol was smashed into his forehead. That was the beginning of fifty minutes of hell as a hostage of the robbers.

The women are being raped at night in Oslo, and the men are robbed more than ever.

In just the past ten years more than 4,000 people have been robbed in the town center and the area of the Grønland police station [an immigrant ghetto]. Most of them are young men. Sturla Nøstvik is robbery-victim 351 from Grønland just from this year, the same period in which around fifty assault-rapes have been reported in Oslo. The robbers play on fear, violence, and severe threats that leave a mark on the victims. Police superintendent Inge Sundeng in Grønland describes them as the “somewhat-forgotten victims”.

The police visited Sturla Nøstvik in the emergency room after the robbery. They told Nøstvik that a gang of robbers had committed many similar robberies in Grünerløkka and surrounding areas in thee past weeks. They told him that everybody should have the right to feel safe, but that they had no way of halting the robberies. “We have lost the city,” they said…

It’s a good thing they burned dead Vikings rather than bury them. Because if they had graves, they’d certainly be spinning in them at the sight of their descendants meekly accepting conquest without any resistance, out of nothing more than fear of being called racist or jailed by their treasonous leaders.

So you’ve lost the city. Big deal. Go take it back, or lose the rest of the country.

To H or not to H

There is some doubt over whether North Korea’s H-bomb test was successful or not:

North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un vowed to celebrate the New Year with ‘the thrilling sound of our first hydrogen bomb’ when he signed to order for today’s nuclear blast.

The hermit state claimed it had detonated a ‘successful’ hydrogen bomb this morning, triggering a 5.1-magnitude earthquake and propelling Kim on a new collision course with world powers.

But experts have been quick to cast doubt on the claims, saying the size of the explosion and resulting earthquake was far too small to have come a failed H-bomb and was likely disguised to appear like one.

I fail to see why it matters all that much either way. North Korea clearly has acquired what it wants, which is the ability to deter any U.S. aggression against it. In light of the numerous U.S. attacks on countries everywhere from Serbia to Syria, it would be very strange if governments around the world did not make a priority of acquiring similar nuclear deterrence.

SJWs, exposed

The SJW calling himself Hawk S. Rabidus made a risibly false claim.

Nobody else is organizing or manipulating things on Goodreads (or the Hugos) using concerted action. There is no cabal.

There most certainly is, as in both cases, the emergent behavior of the various individuals who share an interest in pushing social justice is observably manifest. In the case of the Hugos, the editors at Tor Books have been engaging in concerted action for decades. They have, by their own admission, decided when new awards will be created, when they will win those awards, and when they will step back and permit others to win them. In the case of Goodreads, it is a group of petty SJWs and SJW librarians who have collectively sought to lower the ratings of right wing authors. Thanks to Sean O’Hara, we were able to put together the list of all 100 or so, including moderators like rivka, and librarians like banillah, Bryan Young, davidofterra, and Getty Hesse.

 SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police
by Vox Day, Milo Yiannopoulos (Foreword)
Getty Hesse’s review
Jan 04, 16

did not like it

I’m putting this review up because the book desperately needs a lower rating. One does not need to read this book. The very blurb is resplendent with contradictions.

SJWs subject the world to “their intolerant thought and speech policing,” and yet the VERY NEXT SENTENCE speaks of “the SJW agenda of diversity, tolerance, inclusiveness, and equality.” Tolerance cannot be intolerant. Vox Day is saying here that something is not itself. And he doesn’t even suggest that their “agenda” is something else masquerading as “diversity,tolerance, inclusiveness, and equality,” oh no, rather these things contradict “both science and observable reality.” I’m not even going to bother to explain why that statement is incredibly idiotic. Anyone with half a brain cell should be able to figure it out.

And, for the record, Vox Day is not “the most hated man in science fiction.” He’s the most laughed at.

If SJWs could do logic, they wouldn’t be SJWs. Forgive the digression, but Getty Hesse’s pseudo-dialectic makes my teeth itch. It’s true that X cannot be Not X, but Y most certainly can be. In much the same way Tom Brady is not the New England Patriots playbook, SJWs are not the professed SJW agenda. As usual, both Vox’s First Law and the First Law of SJW can be seen here.

What is interesting about Goodreads is that it provides an excellent way of publicly identifying where people stand on the socio-political spectrum. Aside from the amusement that this latest showdown has provided, it has sparked some very interesting discussions in our tech circle, including some things we’re going to discuss in our next Brainstorm, where we will talk about the planned fork of Wikipedia and the shape of its eventual replacement.

More importantly, this has finally allowed me to answer the core question with which I have been wrestling: do we create something that is a right-wing alternative to Wikipedia or do we shoot to replace it entirely with something better that the left can be safely permitted to use without converging it like they always do?

Speaking of things that provoke laughter, Rolf Nelson received an email from The Goodreads Team explaining why they would not be removing an obviously fake review in which it was apparent that the reviewer could not possibly have read the book.

Goodreads policy allows users to rate a book as soon as it is listed on the site. We do not dictate on what basis Goodreads members form their personal opinions about a book, so we have no rules about reading the full text of a book before rating and reviewing it. We recognize that not everyone will agree with this policy, but it is one that has worked well for the Goodreads community over time.

Users are entitled to express their honest opinions about the book,
even if others feel them to be misguided or wrong. We don’t evaluate a
reader’s opinions based on how, when, or why they made a judgement about
the work that they read. Given the subjective nature of reviews, it’s
hard to designate one review as “wrong” and another “right.” Even if we
could, it would be impractical to manually verify the authenticity of
every statement made in a Goodreads review, and we have to be consistent
in how we apply our policies.  

That would explain why they were able to ban me in good conscience: they have no need to be consistent about how they apply their unviolated non-policies.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that Goodreads’ policy permits the review of books one hasn’t read, as it even permits the review of books that don’t exist. Two Goodreads librarians have one-starred a book that I supposedly wrote for Ben Bella that was never signed to a contract, that I never wrote, and Ben Bella never published. It’s nice that ignoring reality has worked well for the Goodreads community over time, but history is quite clear on the way that reality tends to impose itself in the end.

One more tangent, if you don’t mind. Ben Bella graciously returned to me the audiobook rights to The Irrational Atheist and we expect it to be available on Audible from Castalia House sometime in the February-March timeframe.

Viktor Orban was right

What a pity that the British didn’t come around as quickly when they were warned by Enoch Powell:

Like most members of Hungary’s liberal intellectual elite, George Konrad, a distinguished novelist, loathes his country’s stridently illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orban.

“He is not a good democrat and I don’t believe he is a good person,” said Mr. Konrad, a veteran of communist-era struggles against dictatorship.

All the same, he thinks Mr. Orban, the self-declared scourge of mainstream elites across Europe, was right and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was wrong about how to respond to the chaotic flood of migrants seeking refuge from war and poverty — perhaps Europe’s most serious crisis since World War II.

“It hurts to admit it, but on this point Orban was right,” Mr. Konrad, 82, said, lamenting that in the absence of a joint European effort to control the flow, Hungary was wise to seal its borders and sound the alarm over the perils of allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants, mostly Muslims, to enter Europe willy-nilly.

Quietly, and often with similar misgivings, a growing number of people in Hungary and beyond are wondering whether, despite his shrill and often bigoted message, Mr. Orban had a clearer view of the scale of the migration crisis and its potential hazards than technocrats in Brussels and leaders in Berlin and other European capitals….

In a recent interview with European newspapers, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, the body that presides over European Union summit meetings, described Ms. Merkel’s welcoming approach to migrants as “dangerous”
and endorsed the view long promoted by Mr. Orban — that most of the
asylum seekers entering Europe were not Syrians fleeing war but economic
migrants seeking jobs.

If Europeans are forced to choose between Muslims and nationalists, they will choose nationalists. If they are forced to choose between Muslims and fascists, they will choose fascists. And if they are forced to choose between Muslims and neo-nazis, they will choose neo-nazis.

The secular elites who have welcomed this invasion should rethink their attempt to cling to power and manage the situation they themselves created. They are the problem, not the solution. And all that trying to prevent those who warned them of the consequences of their actions from addressing the situation will accomplish is ensure that more extreme measures are taken.

Very nearly everyone with whom I have spoken is furiously angry. The situation is extremely unstable, and I suspect there will be more than a few newsworthy events in 2016. The mass sexual assault at the Cologne train station is merely the first of many to come.

“There is a shift to the extreme right because the left, or what is left
of the left, and the moderate center right were offering answers that
were wrong,” said Mr. Gyarmati, who heads the International Center for
Democratic Transition, a group that promotes democracy. “Now we are in a
situation where the answers are unpleasant to say the least.”

Sooner or later, reality always imposes itself, no matter how many people insist that 2+2 equals 37.

Review fun with Sean O’Hara

So, it turns out that Sean’s got some really… interesting… reviews. I liked this one of, ahem,  Bodacious Space Pirates, of all things. Apparently if you stare too long into the abyss of hyperspace, you’ll eventually see some oversized tits.

Bodacious Space Pirates: Abyss of Hyperspace Vol. 1
Sean O’Hara’s review
Sep 14, 15

liked it
bookshelves: manga, space-pirates, space-opera, science-fiction
Read on September 13, 2015

I wish the novels would come out in English. This just isn’t a very good substitute.

I wonder why he is reading Bodacious Space Pirates if he can’t read Japanese? Sadly, Sean can’t even get the “review the editing non-review” right, and today introduced the innovative “review the non-editing non-review”:

Riding the Red Horse
Sean O’Hara’s review
Jan 04, 16

did not like it

This book claims to have been edited by Tom Kratman and Teddy Beale. This is a lie. They couldn’t edit an elementary school newsletter. To call what they did here “editing” is an insult to editors the world over. It’s more like they got their friends together and had everyone shit on a plate. And for some reason they’re inordinately proud of what they produced.

But then again, there’s a good chance a similar pile of shit will become President, so maybe they have a point. 

Fascinating. He’s attacking everyone from Jerry Pournelle to William S. Lind. While declaring that the book – the book – claims it was edited by people who did not edit it. I wonder who did? And were they bodacious?

And then there is this, which one would have thought defied description. And yet, Sean somehow manages the trick.

Princess Jellyfish, Vol. 1
Sean O’Hara’s review
Jul 20, 15

really liked it
bookshelves: manga, josei, romance
Read on July 15, 2015

How to sum up the plot of Princess Jellyfish…? Well, it’s a romance involving a love triangle between a nerdy girl, a transvestite, and the transvestite’s brother who’s a rising star of the political world. Also, real estate plays a big role, as does fashion design and of course jellyfish.

Of course jellyfish! How could there not be jellyfish when there are transvestites?

I think it goes without saying that what we have here is a gentlemen who has never, ever, kissed a real live girl. And there is more, there is literally 548 reviews more. You have to read them to believe them; they are too freaking funny!

Better than the story

Quite possibly longer as well. This is an epic review of “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”:

I thought it was cool that the girl narrator loves dinosaurs so much. I
mean, really, who doesn’t love dinosaurs? Especially the T-Rex. The
Biggest, Meanest Big Bad of the Big Bads. Awesome. Well, ok, a five foot
ten inch T-Rex. So not the biggest, but at least the meanest right? And
she feeds it live meat and it’s gory, so still cool, right?

Then
the T-Rex starts singing lullabies, and performing musical theater.
Then it gets married. Whoa. What happened? That’s not the Biggest,
Meanest Big Bad of the Big Bads – that’s Hugh Jackman! Which would still
be cool if it was Wolverine Hugh Jackman, but it’s not. It’s The Boy from Oz
Hugh Jackman. The gay Hugh Jackman. Not that there’s anything wrong
with being gay. I love gay men. Well, I mean, not like that, I enjoy gay
– yes, people, gay people. They’re wonderful.

So just as my
attention starts to wander and I’m thinking about Hugh in all his tight
glitter clothes and sparkley man glory, well, then suddenly the story
twists into this awesome piece of violent dinosaur revenge porn! Just
like Man on Fire with Denzel, but toothier!

Now it’s
got me again, Hugo award for sure! Men soaked in gin and malice? Oh,
yeah, baby, bring me some of that! Ah, I mean, what a beautiful word
picture. Men, gin, malice… mmmm… beautiful. So now there is blood
everywhere, evil cackling laughter, widows and orphans – wooo! I’m out
of my seat cheering on the five foot ten inch T-Rex – and then she’s
back talking about a wedding again for gosh sakes. And it’s not even a
blood soaked Carrie kinda wedding, but a green chiffon wedding – does Hugh have green eyes? I guess I’ve never looked at his eyes.

Then
we find out that the narrator actually hates her fiance because he’s a
pussy who can’t win a bar fight! In her imagination she loved this
awesome man mincing T-Rex that waded through pools of revenge blood but
in real life he was just… a disappointment. He wasn’t the bar fight
winning, beer drinking, tattooed, six foot six inch, 300 pound Hells
Angel alpha male she wanted, just some New York hipster in skinny jeans
who couldn’t take a pool cue across the face.

She wrote this
whole story to rip away the tiny bit of masculinity her fiance still
possessed. A masculinity wax job. That. Is. Cold. I mean, not every man
can be Wolverine Hugh Jackman, but please, why does she hate gay Hugh
Jackman so much?

5 Stars for awesome dinosaur revenge porn – minus 4 stars for the homophobia.

Ilkotism

Two IT jobs in North Carolina:

We are looking for two senior level IT positions and are having a hard time finding good candidates.  I would love to see the positions filled by members of the Ilk.

Senior Converged Infrastructure Engineer
In this case we are looking specifically for someone who is an expert in Compute-Unix/Linux specific and Storage-EMC specific.  AIX/Red Hat, VMware, IBM Power, EMC Storage, VCE Vblock.

Senior Storage Engineer 
7+ years of direct experience managing storage in a large enterprise environment.  EMC experience is highly preferred, but possibly not required. 

No remote option.

If you’re qualified and you’re interested, email me with a resume attached and I’ll forward it onto the relevant party.

On a tangential note, we’re going to have an IT-related January Brainstorm session soon. It will be closed; I just have to work out the date with the panelists.

The Game Dev course begins Saturday. I’ll send out the emails tonight.

The art of punditry

Ross Douthat doubles down. He may have been wrong about Trump before, but he’s still entirely confident that Trump can’t win the nomination:

I certainly overestimated poor Jeb Bush, whom I wrongly predicted would profit from Trump’s rise. But for the rest — no, I had a pretty low opinion of the right-wing entertainment complex to begin with, and I’m not remotely surprised that the white working class would rally to a candidate running on populist and nationalist themes.

I am very surprised, though, that Trump himself would have the political savvy, the (relative) discipline and yes, the stamina required to exploit that opening and become that populist. And for that failure of imagination, I humbly repent.

Of course I’m not completely humbled. Indeed, I’m still proud enough to continue predicting, in defiance of national polling, that there’s still no way that Trump will actually be the 2016 Republican nominee.

Trust me: I’m a pundit.

That’s the true art of punditry. Never changing your mind, even while you are admitting that you’re wrong.

No wonder I couldn’t hack it. Meanwhile, Reihan Salam explains what Douthat missed, and is missing, at NRO:

“[Trump’s] emergence as the voice of the anti-immigration Right is a reflection of the failure of the Republican establishment to grapple with lawlessness at the border and half a century of mass immigration. Consider the events of the past two years. Child migrants have surged into the United States from Central America, and working-class cities and towns across the country are struggling to absorb them. Before the federal courts stepped in, President Obama signed an executive order shielding roughly half of all unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. from the threat of deportation, a move he had previously suggested was out of bounds. And now the U.S. is experiencing yet another wave of Central American arrivals. Border Patrol officials report that many unauthorized immigrants believe that the U.S. is going to welcome them with open arms, and who can blame them given the president’s rhetoric?

Interesting to see that even the heart of cuckservatism is beginning to sense that all is not right with open borders.

They owe him

It’s always interesting to see how SJWs continually vacillate between claiming that I am totally insignificant and can’t possibly achieve anything and asserting that I am a dire threat to SJW convergence who must be stopped at all costs.

You All Owe Me

So, you may be familiar with Vox Day, the neofascist scumbag who tried to game the Hugos last year because the award always goes to so-called “social justice warrior” authors. Well recently, after people pointed out that the Goodreads Choice Awards have a wide, wide user base and still award the same type of books as the Hugos and Nebulas, he decided to take action. Over New Years weekend he announced the formation of a Goodreads group with the purpose of gaming the site. Of course the group was set to private so the evil SJWs wouldn’t be able to see what he was up to.

Too bad for him the only thing keeping out the SJWs was a challenge question that could be answered with a simple Google search. By Saturday night I had access to the group. I didn’t know what to do — undermine him from the inside, play Serpico and leak screenshots on a piecemeal basis, or save them up for a big reveal. The last one seemed the best way not to get caught until I had a good collection of dirt, and I was strongly leaning in that direction.

But after reading File770’s news roundup yesterday, which included a story about someone being ganged up on by Day and his goons, I decided it might be better to give warning where I could…. Since Vlad so kindly left a link to this evil librarian who had cut off
his privileges, I decided to contact him with a warning. Within eight
hours Vox Day’s group was gone and VD’s over on his blog whining about
being banned here.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Sean O’Hara, the SJW infiltrator par excellence, that I made no effort to keep out SJW entryists; I literally wrote the book on SJW entrysm, after all. And Castalia House has been under nonstop cracking attempts since last April. The supersecret question that Sean managed to puzzle out was: “What is the name of the spokesmanatee”.

The goal had absolutely nothing to do with committing any vandalism on the site. The goal was to see to what extent the SJWs were running amok on Goodreads and smoke them out. I also wanted to learn the system in the build-up to the next Reader’s Choice award, which is not something to which I had hitherto paid any attention, but at least superficially looked less corrupt than the Hugo Awards. We discovered how converged the site is much faster than I had anticipated, thanks to Sean and Rivka, who is not only a librarian, but a moderator.

It should be obvious that if I had any desire to wreak havoc, I would not have formed a public group of around 200 people and permitted anyone to join it. I would have simply unleashed the 466 Vile Faceless Minions sworn to mindless obedience of the Supreme Dark Lord.

In any event, this isn’t over. If you want to weigh in, make a Goodreads account, follow my author page, and rate a few books that you’ve read. It only takes a few seconds, and obviously, it is something the SJWs there greatly fear or they would not have reacted as they did. Once more, we see that whatever they have read, it isn’t Sun Tzu.

Here is an example of a one-star review that Goodreads still deems appropriate and features on its site:

Rhea rated it did not like it
Shelves: 0-stars-not-even-literature, never-ever-read

The author is a bag of shit, a brainless cockroach, a demented baboon. He (or should I call him “it”?) is racist and sexist and writes poorly-conceived, cookie-cutter, Tolkein-clone, wish-fulfillment fantasy to fill its empty life. Fuck you and fuck your mother for not having her priorities straight nine months before you were born.

Also, if you read one or two of its blog posts you will see that it has absolutely no sense of logic. I skimmed over one and apperently Vox says that because women are suffering from sex abuse at workplaces, they shouldn’t work at all because their presence is causing “smart capable men” to “turn into rapists.” What the honest fuck?!? WHAT KIND OF ACID DO YOU HAVE TO BE ON TO ARRIVE AT THAT CONCLUSION!?!? Is he drunk??? Is he a troll??? Is he even human??? My theory is that his father had sex with a horse…

Here is an example of a one-star review that Goodreads deemed worthy of a permanent ban and removed from their site, in addition to a four-star review of Banks’s The Business and a five-star review of Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase.

Vox Day rated it did not like it
Shelves: fiction

THE WASP FACTORY, by Iain Banks, was declared to be one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century by The Independent. That being the case, one can only presume that the Unabomber’s Manifesto, a collection of the Best of The Penthouse Forum Letters, and a recipe for recycling human waste finished in the top 10.

The Wasp Factory is grotesque in almost every possible way. It is a horror story that is carefully calculated to shock and appall the senses in much the same way, and for much the same reason, that a performance artist would defecate on stage and then roll around in his own excrement. If one reads this book without feeling at least a little disgusted with the author and inclined to wonder what his problem is, there is almost certainly something psychologically wrong with you. The fact that the author succeeds in his obvious authorial intent is not an indication of “exceptional quality”, but merely demonstrates the depths to which the author intended to descend.

Iain Banks is not a bad writer. Quite the opposite, and I have read and enjoyed a number of his books. But The Wasp Factory is about as egregious a misuse, as irresponsible an abuse, of an author’s literary talent as one can imagine. The plot is absurd, the characters are paper-thin and completely lacking in any credibility whatsoever, and their bizarre sadism is surpassed only by that of the author in subjecting the reader to this novel.

The fact that it was highly praised is a severe indictment of the terrible state of modern literary criticism.